Thursday, May 21, 2015

Labour must understand why it did so badly in
the election, as it is unlikely to be able to mount a successful campaign in
the future if it doesn’t. Much has been written already, although we await a
full analysis in terms of voting patterns and movement by age, class, gender etc.,
but from what we know I believe that we can draw some valid conclusions.

The pollsters got it
significantly wrong, at least for the two main parties, rendering all the
debate about a ‘hung’ parliament redundant, and we await their explanations for
that (There is an interesting article in Open Democracy on this, ‘The polls and
all but one of the forecasts were wrong, Shaun Lawson’).

There were short run factors
that counted. Of these the most significant by far was the unscrupulous use of
the ‘Scottish Card’ by the Tories, tapping in to English nationalist fears that
a Labour government would be controlled by the SNP. There would appear to be
some evidence that this caused a disproportionate swing from ‘Don’t Knows’ to
the Tories ( This could help to explain the polls, as ‘Don’t Knows’ are usually
divided equally between the parties) and for intending Tory defectors to UKIP
to remain where they were.

The oil price fall was a
bonus for the Tories as it helped to promote the impression that the recovery was
well under way.

The continued treachery of
Mandelson ( even in early March he said that he doubted that Labour would win) was not unimportant, and I
do not understand why he has not been suspended pending an investigation into his
undermining of the party – or is it that such things only happen to those on
the left?

While Miliband improved his
standing in the first three TV appearances his performance in the last, and for
that reason crucial appearance on Question Time was fairly dire, and didn’t help,
while the bizarre ‘Edstone’ episode can only have confirmed prejudices that he
was some sort of crank.

However, the election was not
lost primarily for these reasons. There were, in my view, five major factors.

Firstly, Miliband. While I
personally liked him and he came across as honest and principled he should not
have been chosen as leader simply because he lacked the gravitas, authority and
oratorical power that every leader in the television age needs. Much of this is
contrived – Cameron comes across to me as a complete phoney, although large
numbers do not see it that way, but Miliband was unable to inspire as a leader.
This might not have been fatal, but because of other adverse factors it was
telling.

Secondly the party was
divided between the Blairite/Progress wing, who broadly believed that with
suitable updating the policies pursued under Blair, if not Brown, were correct
and were the only basis for a successful appeal to the country, and a broad
left which saw the huge loss of support for Labour in 2005 and 2010 as
indicative of the failure of Blairism in tackling the problems the ordinary
people of the country facedand looked
to a renewed form of social democracy to as a means of tackling those. There
were of course all sorts of variants of these positions, but this fundamental
divide was reflected in the manifesto, in the shadow cabinet and PLP and at all
other levels of the party. The result was the failure to promote an over
arching message or pattern, even though many individual policies were good in
themselves.

Thirdly the decision to avoid
discussion of Labour’s economic record in government, particularly in its third
term, was disastrous as it effectively conceded the Tory lie thatthe deficit was due to government overspending
and not, as was the case, to bailing out the banks after their collapse. (The
lie was allowed to take root during the long leadership campaign in 2010 – are
we making the same mistake again?)

Fourthly, Labour’s effective
capitulation toTory austerity in 2013 meant that it was not possible to present
Labour as committed to measures to stimulate the economy to promote the growth
needed to provide the income required to pay off the deficit. It is admittedly
difficult to persuade large numbers of people that a Keynesian stimulus was the
only way to successfully move forward – as Polly Toynbee remarked ’The paradox
of thrift proved too paradoxical’, but tragically no serious attempt was made
to do so, and it was left to the heroic efforts of Michael Meacher and others
to consistently argue that Labour should campaign on this as well as Labour’s
economic record as in three above, but to no avail.

Fifthly, and perhaps most
tellingly, the electoral strategy was fundamentally misconceived, in that it was
based, as in 2010, to appealing to the centre ground. The 2010 election
conclusively demonstrated that in one sense the strategy was successful in that
social group A/B voters attracted to Labour in 1997 and later largely stayed,
but was disastrous in a more important sense in that large numbers of Labour’s
traditional core supporters in the C2 and D/E social groups went elsewhere or
didn’t vote. The assumption that those to the ‘left’ of the centre have nowhere
else to go was proved wrong. But exactly the same circumstances presented
themselves in 2015, and exactly the same mistakes were made. The article by Jon
Trickett on this blog (Why any leader who can’t reach working class voters will
lose again) reproduces figures for social class movement which prove this, with
once again a substantial falling away in the D/E vote but the A/B vote
remaining steady.

At the same time it is likely
that many of those leftish middle class voters attracted to the Lib-Demsover Iraq and other things in the noughties
but who left them after 2010 and came to Labour decided to go elsewhere, to the
Greens, who recorded their highest ever vote in a general election, to other
left parties or to non voting, on the grounds that Labour policies were not
left wing enough. Likewise the D/E voters, notwithstanding some good policies
on housing tenure and rent, the bedroom tax, agency workers and zero hours
contracts, were not given the impression that their interests, particularly
with regard to housing, jobs, and living standards, were of the greatest
concern to Labour, and thus went elsewhere, particularly to UKIP who probably
took more votes from Labour than from the Tories, or remained as part of the
one third of voters who didn’t vote. Some of the better policies were
introduced too late or were not given enough prominence.

What we know about the class
basis of the recent vote renders all the talk by the Blairites about the
manifesto being anti business, too left wing and not in tune with
‘aspirational’ voters as nonsense. (On this it is surely the task of Labour
governments to seek to make possible the aspirations of most people for a job
with decent pay and conditions, decent housing at affordable cost and decent
education, health and social services. Or is it just the middle class that has
aspirations?)

Labour is at a crossroads. It
can either continue on the path falteringly begun under Ed Miliband towards a
renewed form of social democracy, seeking to provide real solutions to the
problems faced by ordinary people, or it can revert to being a party that ultimately
accepts the dictates of the market and is thus incapable of providing those
solutions. I hope it chooses the right path.

The Labour
party left space on the left of Labour and this space has been filled by the
SNP, which historically has not been a left wing party. The more a political
party moves to the centre, the more likely it is that socialists will look to
other parties or stay at home. Once that gap starts to be exploited, it becomes
almost impossible to recover.

The Labour
Party in Scotland reached a state of
having a small membership and did minimal campaigning in historically safe
seats because winning was easy.

It destroyed
their local councillor base by introducing STV, creating large wards where councillor contact with the electorate decreased, and the change gave seats in
historically solid Labour areas to third parties most notably the SNP.

The
Referendum was held at the wrong time. A previous Labour Leader wanted it when
we controlled the Parliament but was blocked by Westminster Labour. We would
have won it easily 10 years ago but we failed to take the opportunity.

The SNP were
able to use the "run by London" jibe at us and it was effective in making us
appear "less Scottish".

Perhaps the
biggest mistake was not having a Labour 'Yes' campaign and allying ourselves with
the Tories in the 'No' campaign. We also failed to answer blatant untruths by the
SNP in the referendum and by the time we started to do so we were not believed.

Too many aspiring
Scottish politicians believed Westminster was more important than Holyrood.

We failed to
identify SNP weaknesses and capitalise on them e.g. their support for bus
deregulation.

We failed to
capitalise on the tension between rural and urban parts of the SNP.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Clearly, the General Election was a disaster for the Labour Party, as well as the British people. The Tories are now likely to implement their long intended boundary changes, which could cost us another 20 seats. If we are to be able to rebuild to return to Government at the next election, I believe we need to do two things, above all else:1. We need to understand what just happened and why. Scotland must not be vilified for something that was to the fault of Labour's leadership.2. Labour's policy process needs to be subject to binding votes to democratise the process and make it credible inside the party and out.

1. Understanding what happened leading up to the General Election

A lot of people in other parts of the UK are very cross with Scotland, and confused that, in the independence referendum just months ago, Scottish electors decided to stay in the UK, then they send almost exclusively SNP MPs to Westminster.But it is wrong to be cross with Scotland and there is no need for confusion. Coming from a Welsh constituency probably helps me understand. I'll give my view on those two points in reverse.First, the referendum decision was decisive and I am sure the Scottish people did view that as the end of the matter for a generation. That is not the reason for the SNP's success on 7th May, it is not a "surge of nationalism". In Wales, we also have a nationalist party, Plaid Cymru (PC). For UK issues, the electorate trusts Labour to represent them. But for Welsh issues, I have repeatedly seen ordinarily Labour supporters voting for the determinedly “Welsh party”, as they see it – albeit mistakenly - which is why PC is so disproportionately strong in the Welsh Assembly.Rather than trust loyal supporters to understand the socialist arguments for the UK, Labour aligned itself too closely with the Tories over the independence referendum, “talking down” to voters. Then, after the referendum, Labour in London foisted upon Scottish Labour an openly Blairite leader, the clear message being that he intended simply to march the electors on Westminster to win the General Election.So the Scots see first a betrayal, then know they are to be taken for granted and just as pawns in the bigger fight; the Scottish people saw their decision to stay within the UK rewarded by no-one actually listening to their wants and needs.The Scottish people did what I have seen people do in Wales many times: turn to the nationalists as a party which appears determined to stand up for Scotland. The SNP's prime objective is as irrelevant to the immediate question as it has been for many decades: they want someone to speak for the Scottish people now.The blame should be placed squarely where it belongs: with a Labour leadership that ignored its members in all parts of the UK when they consistently told the party it needed to offer the British people an alternative to – not a watered down version of – the Tories, to stand up for people in the way they expect of Labour.When the people were obviously unhappy with energy, communications and transport companies ripping them off, almost completely unregulated, the answer is not a 15 month electricity prices freeze. When pay is driven down and people forced to accept whatever insecure employment they are offered, the answer is not to pledge to raise the minimum wage by 30p a year to 2020. When the NHS is being carved up for privateers, the answer is not to trim back some of the more obvious profiteering.Blame belongs to the Labour leadership who argued we must not “scare the horses” with socialist policies, instead of trusting the electorate to embrace policies befitting the Labour Party.It is difficult to see how Labour can rebuild in Scotland and the UK as a whole, but a good start would be to begin to shape policies that offer a real alternative to government for the rich.Which brings me to my the second thing I believe we need to do...

2. Labour's Policy Process needs to be subject to binding votes

Labour's National Policy Forum elections are due soon, which is good, as we need to be getting on with policy reformulation, so we can offer a real alternative to government by and for the rich.But if all we do is start the same process again, we will lose again and let down the British people again. As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.Only one major change is needed: to make the policy process subject to binding votes amongst members. We cannot again obediently receive meandering documents on subjects chosen for us behind closed doors, debate points at members' policy forums, then submit comments that we all know are largely ignored, resulting in a programme bearing little resemblance to the wishes of Labour Party members.Wanting to subject the party's policy process to binding votes will be condemned by the Right as risking showing damaging discord and disunity in public. That is a lie that the Right has successfully employed for decades to allow them to run the party as the personal fiefdom of an elite few. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being seen to work out policies by frank and open debate. Making policies in secret and acting as if we need the media's permission to be elected clearly and emphatically failed.Blairites, Progress will argue we need to move to the right to capture more Tory voters. That is clearly nonsense, acting like neo-Tories was a big part of our failure in the General Election. We should not again allow our leaders to treat the electorate as if they are fools.I believe members of the Labour Party need to demand that the policy process be democratised, so we can get on with the business of forming policies and a programme relevant to the people of Britain.

Mike Bird, ordinary member of Aberconwy Constituency

The 2015 General
Election was a terrible result for Wales. Five years of self-defeating,
poverty-creating state-shrinking austerity from the coalition was bad enough,
five more years of the Tories governing alone will be worse. The assault on the
public sector threatens thousands of Welsh jobs, the £12 billion in ‘welfare’
cuts will make life even more difficult for the poor and the vulnerable and for
many disabled people life will literally not be worth living. The cuts to the
Welsh budget will result in cuts to the revenue support and grants to local
authorities, making it increasingly difficult for them to deliver basic
services and producing what is for the Tories an added bonus of Labour local
authorities blaming a Labour government for Tory cuts.

The Tory Secretary
of State for Wales Stephen Crabb, more affable than the sinister and unpleasant
David Jones, has promised Wales ‘fair funding’, but in the absence of any reform
of the Barnett formula, this will be a typical Tory trap, likely to amount to
little more than Wales being cut loose financially, without the resources it
needs, leaving Welsh (Labour) governments to take the blame. In every other
way, Wales will be shackled to a political entity governed according to the
economic needs and priorities of finance capital and the City of London and the
political preoccupations of the English nationalists in the Tory party.This was also a
terrible result for Welsh Labour. Yes, the share of the vote in Wales went up,
but only marginally, from 36% to 36.9%, compared to 55% in 1997. In terms of
seats, the picture is worse. The Tories have won 11, more than any time since
1983 (they had none in 1997 or 2001). Their victory in Labour’s number one
target seat in Wales, Cardiff North, was unexpected and sobering. Their victory
in Gower, over an excellent Labour candidate, the socialist Liz Evans, was a
tragedy. The Tories’ share of the vote in Wales, after five years of
Westminster-imposed austerity which, for a number of reasons (reliance on public
sector employment, low pay, and the number of people claiming benefits) has hit
Wales hard, actually increased to 27.2% following a previous increase in 2010.

It gets worse. UKIP
came second in a number of constituencies with a share of the vote overall in Wales
of 13.6%, just above that for the UK as a whole of 12.6% but in some Valleys and semi-Valleys
constituencies their performance was even more alarming – for example: 17.2% in
Swansea East; 18.7% in Merthyr and Rhymney; 19% in Torfaen; 19.3% in Caerphilly;
and 19.6% in Islwyn. On these figures, UKIP is on course to win several Assembly
seats in 2016.

Although Plaid’s
vote went up in some areas, UKIP and the Tories drove Plaid into fourth place
in terms of theoverall popular vote,
despite the Plaid leader Leanne Wood coming out well from the televised
debates. Plaid hit a wall. It held onto its three seats, failing to win its
main target seat of Ynys Môn. It is possible that only a Jim Murphy (or Alun
Michael)-type stewardship of Welsh Labour would let Plaid into the South, as it
did in 1999. The Liberal–Democrat vote collapsed, leaving one only MP. There
was little evidence of the ‘Green surge’, the middle-class liberals who
comprise the party in Wales congratulating themselves on reducing the number of
lost deposits. The combined far left barely troubled the scorers, its one
notable contributionbeing an act of
sectarian sabotage;the Trade Union and
Socialist Coalition (TUSC) received 103 votes in Gower, where Liz Evans, a trade
unionist and socialist par excellence, lost by 27 votes.

There are a number
of reasons for these results. Most importantly, Labour did poorly in the UK as
a whole. It never established a consistent, coherent anti-austerity
narrative.The chief architect of its
muddled strategy of austerity-lite was Ed Balls who in Morley and Outwood fell
on the sword he had spent five years forging. On the contrary, in 2010, while Labour was spending five months
on a seemingly interminableleadership
contest, the Tories were establishing very firmly in the public mind, with the
aid of a friendly media, the idea that Labour ‘caused’ the crisis of 2008-2009
by overspending.The Labour leadership
appeared reluctant to defend its own record of bringing the economy back into
growth by 2010. As the representatives in the Labour movement of neo-liberalism
it is probably inevitable that New Labour politicians would be at best only
partial, conditional defenders of Keynesianism, let alone its advocates.

In so far as Ed
Miliband did break from the post-Thatcher consensus and attack predatory
capitalism he was not only attacked and vilified by its representatives,
attacks which he stood up to with considerable dignity and courage, but was undermined
at times by unrepentant Blairites in his own shadow cabinet, as well as old
hands from the Blair years. There was also the anti-politics mentality from which
UKIP reaps the benefit, or which at least reduces the turnout in Labour areas,
as well as the legacy of the New Labour years, the lack of trust over Iraq and
the feeling that the parties are all the same.

Then there was
Scotland, where Labour committed political suicide by aligning itself to both austerity
and unionism. However, the arithmetic of that wipe-out cannot alone explain why
Labour failed to win. All those seats lost to the SNP would not have given
Labour a majority. The Tories, seven months after Scotland had voted to stay in
the UK and seven months after Cameron’s wheedling sentimentality about the
sacredness of the union, treated the Scots as a treacherous fifth column, which
probably scared some floating voters in England and Wales, but overall, that
factor takes second place to the failure to combat austerity, which is of
course partly why Labour lost Scotland in the first place.

All these factors
have a resonance in Wales, reliant as it is, to a large extent, on the
metropolitan media, from which Welsh voters would have had the Tory smears
about the Welsh NHS without the inconvenient truth about the imminent financial
meltdown in England, but there are home-grown factors as well. While the
collapse of the Liberal-Democrats explains the Tory victory in Brecon and
Radnorshire (and the Labour win, by the excellent left wing candidate Jo
Stevens, in Cardiff Central against a Liberal Democrat in contrast to its
failure in Cardiff North against the Tories) this is largely a Labour
problem.Local branches are often
undemocratic shells, frequently dominated by self-serving cliques, a situation only
encouraged by the lack of party democracy. Organisation on the ground appears to
be at best patchy, characterised by the heroic efforts of a few individuals,
and at worst incompetent or non-existent. There is a failure to understand the
popularity of UKIP, seeing it purely as a question of racism.

The worst thing is
that there is a feeling that there isn’t really a problem; we keep on winning,
so it’s all OK, isn’t it? For some this is given a ‘left’ gloss by the Welsh
government’s distinct ‘Clear Red Water’ policy
agenda, which, despite the loss ofsome
of its radical edge, with the departure of Jane Davidson and Rhodri himself,
has nevertheless protected Welsh people from some of the worst New Labour and
Tory policiesin publicservices. While the ‘Clear Read Water’ has
become somewhat diluted in recent years, its past achievements have lent
credence to some of the lazy assertions that make up the party’s rhetoric in
Wales: ‘Labour’s values are Welsh values’, ‘the Tories do not speak for Wales’.
Well, clearly, a growing number of Welsh people think that they do. How long can
the radicalism and the intellectual rigour of Mark Drakeford, for example,
coincide with the slovenly decadence and lack of accountability, which is
increasingly evident in that outpost of pound-shop Blairism, the party organisation?
How long can we claim that Wales has a
distinct political culture based on solidarity and egalitarianism when we are
so vulnerable to unionist parties of the right, be they representatives of
finance capital or of right-wing populism?

We need to learn
from Scotland. However, in in one sense,
Scottish Labour could have learned from us. We in Wales might have gone the same way as
Scotland but instead we were saved by Rhodri Morgan and Clear Red Water, so the
disaster of the short-lived administration of Alun Michael which cost Labour so
dear in the 1999 Assembly elections was never repeated. Scottish Labour did not
learn from Wales. The party had one last chance, to elect Neil Findlay, but did
not take it. ‘Better Together’ demonstrated that the process of decay was
already well advanced.

When politics in
the UK got more lively, interesting and radical than it has been for decades,
Scottish Labour were defensive onlookers. We need Wales to be like Scotland, to
develop the radical independent political environment, which challenges both austerity
and the Westminster-dominated political norms and culture, which brought it.
Unlike in Scotland, Welsh Labour still has enough residual political credit
from ‘Clear Red Water’ to ride that tiger itself, in collaboration with the
socialists in Plaid Cymru and independent socialists and environmentalists.
This need not have the dynamic towards full, state independence which exists in
Scotland, but it can result in an indigenous Welsh radicalism which can act in
the interests of the people of Wales in collaboration with co-thinkers in
Scotland, England and beyond.

Admittedly this is
more in the realm of aspiration at the moment. The situation in Scotland is the
result of a concatenation of factors, some going back 300 years, some going
back 30, which are not on all fours with Welsh history and politics, but there
is one concrete and immediate way in which we can get the process started: the
2016 Welsh Assembly elections. Nicola Sturgeon promised to help Ed Miliband lock Cameron out of Downing Street. Ed did not accept
this gracious offer, for fear of being bullied by the Tory press and because he
feared that any good will shown towards the SNP would play badly with his own
activists in Scotland. We in Welsh Labour need to turn Sturgeon’s offer on its
head and make an offer to Plaid to lock the Tories, and UKIP, out of the Senedd.
This would involve, principally, Labour voters in Labour stronghold being
prepared give Plaid their second vote, rather than give their own party a
second, wasted vote. Agreement on details would have to be hammered out on a
region-by region basis. In North and West Wales Plaid voters would have to
reciprocate by voting Labour in Labour-Tory marginals such as Aberconwy and
Clwyd West.

This proposal
would meet with resistance with some activists in both parties. To those Labour
members who refuse to work with ‘nationalists’, do they really seeLeanne Wood as much of an enemy as Andrew RT
Davies? Conversely, do Plaid members see
Mark Drakeford as a New Labour, Westminster hack? The answers to both those
questions will let us all know where we stand. To socialists in both parties,
it offers a way of strengthening Wales against Westminster and protecting it
from austerity. A desperate situation requires not bunker mentality
party-patriotism but some new thinking.